Too much video games: Geometry Wars 3 and its antecedents
I've been playing video games a lot lately, partly because of Christmas.
The one I've experienced enough of to write something like a knowledgeable review is Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, the latest in a series of twin-stick shooters with gameplay that is essentially a refinement of the old Robotron: 2084 formula (move with one stick, shoot in all directions with the other).
The game that hooked me on this sort of thing was Battle-Girl, an obscure game for the Macintosh (and, later, Windows PCs) from the 1990s.
It was actually a lot like Geometry Wars, in that both of them combined fast and frenetic twin-stick shooter gameplay (this video has a lower frame rate than it really had) with spare geometric graphics that deliberately imitated a 1980s Atari vector arcade game, and a thumping dance music soundtrack. Both of them even gave you a ship that looked like the claw from Tempest.
Geometry Wars (which began as an Easter egg in one of the Project Gotham Racing games) stripped down the gameplay to a kill-or-be-killed minimum, in which you just fend off swarm after swarm of increasingly numerous and difficult enemies. The sequels have added all sorts of variations to that.
The variant of this that I've played the most was the somewhat obscure Geometry Wars: Galaxies on the Wii (not developed by original creator Stephen Cakebread), which organized its levels into a sort of gradually unlocked campaign progression. The previous versions that most people are familiar with, however, are Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and Retro Evolved 2 on the XBox 360, which didn't.
Consequently, many reviewers seem to be somewhat nonplussed by the fact that Geometry Wars 3 is as much a sequel to Galaxies as to the XBox titles! It has the Pacifism (can't shoot at all), King (can shoot only in special shrinky zones), and Deadline (timed with unlimited lives) variants from Retro Evolved 2, but also has a Galaxies-like campaign progression, and adds periodic boss levels. It also gives you a sidekick drone with different functional modes that you gradually unlock as you play; that was introduced in Galaxies. As in both RE2 and Galaxies, you collect little shards called "geoms" to build up your score multiplier; but they got rid of the cruel rule from Galaxies that your multiplier goes back to one every time you lose a life (though on many levels you have only one life).
The geoms are also used as a currency to buy upgrades to the capabilities of your drone (including a super attack that you can use in limited numbers), but this little economy is a bit pointless, since there's nothing else to do with the hoarded geoms, and you accumulate them at such a rate that upgrading every drone type and every super attack to maximum is something you can do pretty much immediately. It also seems as if the first two drone types you get, Attack (which just shoots in the same direction you do) and Collect (which hoovers up geoms), are the only ones that are really of much use; the Sweep drone from Galaxies that worked like a sort of deadly weedwhacker is gone. I also tend to lean heavily on the Homing super, which just fires a long salvo of homing missiles; the more exotic ones aren't as good for me. (There is a Turret super that looks good, but I haven't earned it yet.)
A new thing is the addition of "superstates", these weird patterns of dots that give you temporary weapon power-ups if you can annihilate them, though they'll also kill you if you collide with them. One of the most frustrating things about the game is that deadly things can spawn right on top of you, with only the slightest degree of warning (there's a glow that appears a split second before it happens). So you have to remember to keep out of the zones where the superstates appear at the times that they're about to show up, which are somewhat predictable. This is the sort of game where mastering a level means playing it many times to learn its ways, like a 1980s arcade classic.
The biggest new thing is that some of the levels take place on curved surfaces in space, a little like Dag Ågren's Swear/MilkSnake, which affects the motion of objects and also limits what you can see at any one time. The look has also been overhauled and is less self-consciously retro, though it's still made largely of glowing vectors. I like the new look, except that I wish the colors didn't now tend so heavily toward the teal/orange color grading that has become such a cliché in the movies.
All manner of things are here to antagonize you. There are levels with a spreading bubbly infection (actually another Galaxies inheritance), levels with moving crusher walls that can sometimes kill you at a touch, Pacifism and King variants, Titan levels with giant enemies that split and multiply like the asteroids in Asteroids, even a timed level that is 10 minutes long just to wear you out.
I usually hate boss levels, but I actually enjoy the ones in this game, which occur every fifth level early on and every tenth later. The bosses, which have color-coded jewel names ("Sapphire", "Ruby", etc.) look like angry polyhedra, and they have a red dodecahedral shield that makes them invulnerable part of the time, and they're surrounded by constantly spawning swarms of minions, and you have to deal with both a one-life maximum and time limits, and in their later stages they get really pissed off and start chasing after you like a mad dog. They also do weird things like spawning alternate shadow-selves on some levels. For some reason they don't bore and frustrate me like so many videogame bosses do.
I think part of the reason I like them is actually a kind of cheap trick they pulled to lengthen the game. Every level has three target scores represented by one, two or three stars, analogous to what they do in Angry Birds, or Galaxies' bronze, silver and gold medals. Normally you can advance to the next level after getting the first star, but to unlock the boss levels, you also have to collect some total number of stars... and that number keeps increasing as a multiple of the levels you've played. So you have to do some grinding to move forward. By the time you actually unlock the boss, your skills are probably well up to beating it. Maybe they just distributed the frustration into the rest of the game!
I'm currently up to the absolutely insane Amethyst levels, which have such things as a peanut-shaped world with teleporters that is menaced by a spreading infection and a moving deadly wall, and I still love this game. It's vicious and unfair in a way calculated to keep me glued to the controller. I am a bit baffled by all the reviews that criticize it essentially for not being exactly the same game as Retro Evolved 2; you can still play that if you want! (Actually, you can play something very much like it even in this game: they kept straight reimplementations of most of the Retro Evolved 2 game types as a side game. Some of the aficionados of the older XBox releases seem to insist that these are the only levels worth playing. Whatever; they're welcome to them.)
The one I've experienced enough of to write something like a knowledgeable review is Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, the latest in a series of twin-stick shooters with gameplay that is essentially a refinement of the old Robotron: 2084 formula (move with one stick, shoot in all directions with the other).
Click to viewThe game that hooked me on this sort of thing was Battle-Girl, an obscure game for the Macintosh (and, later, Windows PCs) from the 1990s.
It was actually a lot like Geometry Wars, in that both of them combined fast and frenetic twin-stick shooter gameplay (this video has a lower frame rate than it really had) with spare geometric graphics that deliberately imitated a 1980s Atari vector arcade game, and a thumping dance music soundtrack. Both of them even gave you a ship that looked like the claw from Tempest.
Geometry Wars (which began as an Easter egg in one of the Project Gotham Racing games) stripped down the gameplay to a kill-or-be-killed minimum, in which you just fend off swarm after swarm of increasingly numerous and difficult enemies. The sequels have added all sorts of variations to that.
The variant of this that I've played the most was the somewhat obscure Geometry Wars: Galaxies on the Wii (not developed by original creator Stephen Cakebread), which organized its levels into a sort of gradually unlocked campaign progression. The previous versions that most people are familiar with, however, are Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and Retro Evolved 2 on the XBox 360, which didn't.
Consequently, many reviewers seem to be somewhat nonplussed by the fact that Geometry Wars 3 is as much a sequel to Galaxies as to the XBox titles! It has the Pacifism (can't shoot at all), King (can shoot only in special shrinky zones), and Deadline (timed with unlimited lives) variants from Retro Evolved 2, but also has a Galaxies-like campaign progression, and adds periodic boss levels. It also gives you a sidekick drone with different functional modes that you gradually unlock as you play; that was introduced in Galaxies. As in both RE2 and Galaxies, you collect little shards called "geoms" to build up your score multiplier; but they got rid of the cruel rule from Galaxies that your multiplier goes back to one every time you lose a life (though on many levels you have only one life).
The geoms are also used as a currency to buy upgrades to the capabilities of your drone (including a super attack that you can use in limited numbers), but this little economy is a bit pointless, since there's nothing else to do with the hoarded geoms, and you accumulate them at such a rate that upgrading every drone type and every super attack to maximum is something you can do pretty much immediately. It also seems as if the first two drone types you get, Attack (which just shoots in the same direction you do) and Collect (which hoovers up geoms), are the only ones that are really of much use; the Sweep drone from Galaxies that worked like a sort of deadly weedwhacker is gone. I also tend to lean heavily on the Homing super, which just fires a long salvo of homing missiles; the more exotic ones aren't as good for me. (There is a Turret super that looks good, but I haven't earned it yet.)
A new thing is the addition of "superstates", these weird patterns of dots that give you temporary weapon power-ups if you can annihilate them, though they'll also kill you if you collide with them. One of the most frustrating things about the game is that deadly things can spawn right on top of you, with only the slightest degree of warning (there's a glow that appears a split second before it happens). So you have to remember to keep out of the zones where the superstates appear at the times that they're about to show up, which are somewhat predictable. This is the sort of game where mastering a level means playing it many times to learn its ways, like a 1980s arcade classic.
The biggest new thing is that some of the levels take place on curved surfaces in space, a little like Dag Ågren's Swear/MilkSnake, which affects the motion of objects and also limits what you can see at any one time. The look has also been overhauled and is less self-consciously retro, though it's still made largely of glowing vectors. I like the new look, except that I wish the colors didn't now tend so heavily toward the teal/orange color grading that has become such a cliché in the movies.
All manner of things are here to antagonize you. There are levels with a spreading bubbly infection (actually another Galaxies inheritance), levels with moving crusher walls that can sometimes kill you at a touch, Pacifism and King variants, Titan levels with giant enemies that split and multiply like the asteroids in Asteroids, even a timed level that is 10 minutes long just to wear you out.
I usually hate boss levels, but I actually enjoy the ones in this game, which occur every fifth level early on and every tenth later. The bosses, which have color-coded jewel names ("Sapphire", "Ruby", etc.) look like angry polyhedra, and they have a red dodecahedral shield that makes them invulnerable part of the time, and they're surrounded by constantly spawning swarms of minions, and you have to deal with both a one-life maximum and time limits, and in their later stages they get really pissed off and start chasing after you like a mad dog. They also do weird things like spawning alternate shadow-selves on some levels. For some reason they don't bore and frustrate me like so many videogame bosses do.
I think part of the reason I like them is actually a kind of cheap trick they pulled to lengthen the game. Every level has three target scores represented by one, two or three stars, analogous to what they do in Angry Birds, or Galaxies' bronze, silver and gold medals. Normally you can advance to the next level after getting the first star, but to unlock the boss levels, you also have to collect some total number of stars... and that number keeps increasing as a multiple of the levels you've played. So you have to do some grinding to move forward. By the time you actually unlock the boss, your skills are probably well up to beating it. Maybe they just distributed the frustration into the rest of the game!
I'm currently up to the absolutely insane Amethyst levels, which have such things as a peanut-shaped world with teleporters that is menaced by a spreading infection and a moving deadly wall, and I still love this game. It's vicious and unfair in a way calculated to keep me glued to the controller. I am a bit baffled by all the reviews that criticize it essentially for not being exactly the same game as Retro Evolved 2; you can still play that if you want! (Actually, you can play something very much like it even in this game: they kept straight reimplementations of most of the Retro Evolved 2 game types as a side game. Some of the aficionados of the older XBox releases seem to insist that these are the only levels worth playing. Whatever; they're welcome to them.)